Buidler DAO: A Must-Read Article on Web3 Operations and Growth
This article covers discussions related to social interaction, operational strategies, content creation, and more.Article: @Buidler DAO
Editor: @Wenshuang
Typesetting: @Coucou
The Deep Selection is our recommended must-read articles under this week's hot market discussion topics, sourced from the daily push of the Buidler DAO Cognitive Locust Program; here, senior readers of Web3 Native will extract the core content and personal deep thoughts from the complex information sources.
When the market is in a cold cycle, growth remains the key indicator that project parties are closely monitoring. From envisioning and finding traffic entry points to setting goals in social and DID & SBT directions; from infrastructure and application overviews to project operation strategy analysis; from new paradigms of content creation to debates on the redefinition of value. This article covers relevant discussions on social, operational strategies, content creation, and more. Read on to understand the core points!
Note: Long press to identify the QR code on the right side of the title to read the original text.
Article Overview:
01/ What can Web3 learn from the timeline structure of Twitter @CatBoss
02/ The most successful applications are packaged games @Abby
03/ SBT: The key to unlocking the future of DeSoc @wenchuan
04/ Web3 Social: The road to mass adoption @CatBoss
05/ How to cold start a project to 10k users at zero cost: Testing 13 Web3 growth platforms @will
06/ Can Web3 "membership cards" link restaurants and bring more repeat customers? @JZ
07/ The journey from 0 to 1 of a hundred-fold new blue-chip丨Killabears case study @shuang^
08/ Endless media: Can ChatGPT replace humans as content creators? @shuang^
The Growing Pains of Current Web3: Transaction volume has increased 100 times in two years, yet the solutions for Web3 data infrastructure cannot cope with the growth. Twitter and the Web3 ecosystem share many similarities; it too faced such scalability issues. This article will focus on what Web3 can learn from Twitter's scalability solutions.
Twitter Data Architecture: When a Twitter user posts a tweet today, Twitter first writes it into Manhattan, a distributed key-value database used to store user tweets, direct messages, account details, etc. The presentation of the Twitter timeline does not create a connection table between followers and tweets but retrieves tweets from a single table in the cache.
Similarities in data access patterns between Twitter and Web3:
High read volume, but each record is small. On EVM chains, the average size of logs and transactions is only a few KB.
The latest data will be viewed more frequently, with most views coming from the first few hours after publication.
Data is immutable for a short time.
Current Web3 applications need to continuously call many different APIs to implement business logic, lacking an important component to effectively aggregate relevant data. This article recommends ZettaBlock, a full-stack Web3 data infrastructure platform that provides real-time, reliable APIs and analytics, aggregating all relevant data and reducing development time and API latency by 70% and 90%, respectively. Thoughts One impressive aspect of the article is a chart comparing the writing traffic of Twitter and Web3, which has almost perfectly overlapped so far. After this point, Twitter's traffic skyrocketed; if this trajectory continues, Web3 will also see a massive increase in data traffic access. Current Web3 data cannot be called aggregated; they are still isolated islands, and developers often have to call many APIs to implement simple business logic. Therefore, achieving data aggregation and providing real-time reliable APIs will be widely welcomed.
The article summarizes the three core principles of "what is a game":
Motivation: Why does a person want to play your game?
Mastery: What are the rules and systems of the game?
Feedback: How will this person learn these rules?
Early gamified applications prioritized short-term engagement over long-term retention, while game-like applications closely align with user needs and achieve long-term user retention. The article provides multiple examples as extended explanations. Thoughts We often see some successful cases and assume their success comes from external incentives (points/badges/token/NFT). But in reality, the core is to leverage the product to satisfy users' intrinsic motivations. The best designers often assume users will not read the manual and design products in a way that encourages Learning By Doing, setting up iterative feedback loops along the way.
SBT can help users build native digital identities in the Web3.0 world, ultimately realizing the vision of a decentralized society. SBT and DID share overlapping concepts; functionally, both aim to describe user characteristics through certificates or identifiers to construct a digital identity. SBT is a bottom-up solution and a means to achieve decentralized identity.
Main differences between SBT and DID:
SBT is a bottom-up solution and a means to achieve identity.
The identity constructed by SBT is a solution based on addresses, while DID aims to achieve a solution based on a collection of addresses to some extent.
Currently, there are three main types of SBT-based projects: certificate types, identity types, and semi-credit loan types.
Current challenges of SBT: No unified technical standards, difficulty in balancing privacy protection and verification, and some application scenarios have vulnerabilities.
Potential use cases: Cross-platform SBT allows users more freedom in operations, refined SBT enables more precise marketing, and widely applicable SBT helps achieve credit. Thoughts After reading through, I personally believe that SBT and DID both belong to the on-chain identity track, differing only in presentation, verification, and issuance standards. Currently, everyone's vision of on-chain identity is based on humanity's inherent desire for social display and achieving unsecured lending in DeFi; social and money are inseparable parts of identity. What can be digitized can be displayed, but how can the parts that cannot be digitized be recognized by others?
Compared to Web2, the core of Web3 social is to provide three main unique utilities: First, asset creation and shared ownership. Web3 social applications can create a shared ownership structure with their users using blockchain. Second, open data and identity: On-chain accumulated data and credentials are shared across the ecosystem. Third, a composable ecosystem: dApps built on smart contract blockchains like Ethereum are inherently composable, allowing developers to build on existing applications in a permissionless manner.
The Web3 social ecosystem can be divided into the following parts: infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools.
Infrastructure: Projects are trying to provide customized infrastructure to meet the needs of social applications.
Middleware: Most of the latest innovations in Web3 are built on existing ecosystems, and middleware protocols establish these existing infrastructures, aiming to mediate between blockchains and applications by querying, organizing, and presenting data to application developers.
Applications: Web3 social applications are a diverse product portfolio suitable for different scenarios. Prominent forms include social media, community-based applications, and instant messaging products.
Tools: Unlike applications, tools are a set of products that leverage Web3 interoperability, designed to be "portable" across different platforms and blockchains.
Currently, Web3 social cannot directly compete with Web2 social in user experience; to succeed, it needs to provide unique innovative utilities. We are monitoring innovations in the following areas: mobile applications: a significant portion of social activity occurs on mobile, and we look forward to more innovations on this platform.
Crypto-native innovations: Many current Web3 social products are replicas of Web2 products; we believe that truly adopted social products will only come from those that provide transformative experiences to users using blockchain primitives. Connections to Web3 scenarios: Successful Web3 products can also emerge from solving Web3 native scenarios, such as on-chain community management. Thoughts The original text provides a detailed analysis of the Web3 social track, covering aspects from core to ecosystem. The current consensus is that Web3 social will be based on unified on-chain data and on-chain identity, so connecting middleware protocols between infrastructure and applications is a hot topic in the current track, such as Lens, CyberConnect, RSS3, etc. However, native Web3 social applications still have a long way to go to achieve the large-scale adoption seen in Web2.
Compared to Web2, Web3 currently lacks a systematic GTM methodology and is still in a relatively blind growth phase, but the logic and processes of both are similar, requiring customer acquisition, activation, retention, and referral. Among these, customer acquisition in Web3 has many common strategies, such as AMA, Giveaway, Collab, etc.
Based on these common scenarios, effectively utilizing Web3 native growth platforms can significantly improve early customer acquisition efficiency and reduce customer acquisition costs. This article introduces the current mainstream 13 Web3 growth platforms and categorizes them based on traffic, user overlap, functionality, and other aspects.
Traffic Comparison:
The traffic differences among platforms are significant, roughly divided into three tiers. Galxe stands alone, as its natural traffic can balance the second-tier platforms, namely Port3, Pyme, Quest3, Link3, TaskOn, and Trantor, among which Quest3 Banner has a clear traffic advantage.
User Overlap Comparison:
All platforms have a high overlap with Galxe users; Port3, Link3, and Galxe users are highly overlapping; Pyme and Trantor also have a high user overlap.
Functionality comparison can be seen in the original text images. Thoughts I participated in the cold start operations of two Web3 products from 0 to 1, and my overall feeling is that the growth methods of Web2 do not quite fit into Web3 products; blindly copying will not work, and there are many policy restrictions. The method of releasing tokens cannot be implemented in the short term. Some Web3 growth platforms introduced in this article can find many similar products when compared to Web2, such as "Qutoutiao," "Kuaishou Express," etc. After practical testing, they can indeed achieve efficient growth, and I will try to implement them in future product growth.
Web3 application Blackbird, founded in 2022 in New York, is a platform designed for restaurants concerning payments, loyalty (favorability), and membership systems. Its purpose is to solve a mainstream and particularly tricky problem in the industry: how to deepen the relationship between restaurants and customers. The focus is on rewarding users for dining frequency, rewarding dining expenditures, and all aspects related to loyalty, increasing the lifetime value of individual consumers.
This platform was founded by Ben Leventhal, co-founder and former CEO of the American online restaurant reservation service Resy. Earlier, he co-founded and led Eater.com, which was acquired by Vox in 2013, and Resy was acquired by American Express in 2019. The technology stack of Blackbird is still undecided, but it is expected that Web3 components need to be abstracted to attract mainstream consumers.
Similar to Blackbird is Devour, which aims to bring the restaurant world into Web3, creating its token $DPAY, hoping to become the preferred token in the food and beverage industry, and has launched a series of membership NFTs to help restaurants place their most enthusiastic fans at the center of their customer engagement strategies, resonating more with the younger generation that values unique experiences over traditional promotions and discounts. Thoughts Devour has more information, but it may not be doing well due to high crypto thresholds and insufficient acceptance: 1) The platform links 12 restaurants, 2) $DEPAY serves as the payment and reward token, but its current value is only $0.00485464, 3) Issued a total of 10,000 VIP NFTs, but only 801 have been minted, 4) ETH trading volume, with 20% of NFT minting revenue going to restaurants, and holding NFTs can earn $DEPAY rewards monthly; however, the value of $DEPAY itself is not anchored (the platform prefers its own token for payment but should also accept ETH, etc.), 5) The community has only 500 members, with 50 active participants.
Firstly, the NFT + offline consumption is a field that places great emphasis on business development and industry know-how. Currently, visible projects are concentrated in the U.S. region, and the teams all have experience in the restaurant and hotel industry, needing to be extremely user-friendly for ordinary users. Secondly, currently, apart from helping brands build membership systems, there is no particularly effective narrative. Devour's approach of issuing membership NFTs centered on itself needs to empower data analysis, such as user tagging, for brand use.
Finally, I personally believe that the most challenging issue for a third-party platform is: whether it is necessary to issue its own token, and if so, how to design an economic system that gives its own token consensus value (this is very difficult for a third-party platform). If not, how to capture platform value and build its own ecosystem in the long term, but there is currently no good solution to this problem.
This article introduces a new blue-chip NFT project study: Killabears.
The project operation strategies are as follows:
In DC operations, a set of OG screening standards was designed and benefits were provided;
Focus on community culture, decentralizing power to the community, voting on various decisions;
The project has developed a unique IP route. The metaverse of Killabears is already taking shape;
The article concludes with a summary of the project's operational rhythm and important nodes from 0 to 1, available for everyone to view. Thoughts Three Takeaways:
Utilizing collective wisdom is very important, but establishing a co-build culture within a project's community is not easy. Killabears effectively utilizes community insights by actively listening to community opinions, stimulating users' deep participation interest, and thus deeply binding them to the project.
A clever storytelling approach is essential in IP development; based on rich story content, derivative products must be created, from image editing to short videos, allowing participants to receive gamified rewards.
Timely summarizing key phases of the project and publishing them is crucial. A few pieces of information may seem insignificant when the project initially garners no attention, but for project teams with higher goals, the initial context of information cannot be overlooked, and it can further establish trust with holders.
This article discusses the impact and significance of AI on content creation following the recent widespread use of ChatGPT.
The author first attempts to define "endless media," analyzing the impact that the emergence of AI can bring from the perspectives of production and consumption. Next, three standards needed for AI in an almost infinite media world are listed: quality, speed, and cost. Then, the author triggers a rethinking of value, discussing the positions of issuers and consumers in IP creation and the discussion of content ownership.
Finally, the question is raised: Is this way of creation fair to artists and writers? This leads to important reflections on human work. If endless media can create fractals on almost every topic, the author hopes to provoke thoughts about the future common language of humanity. Thoughts Media is emerging endlessly because the channels for expression are ubiquitous. People need time to adapt to the gameplay of "infinite content" bullets. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, the boundaries of art sometimes seem to be disappearing; something that is already difficult to define becomes even more unpredictable in the tide of this wave. The faucet of creativity, like a dimensionality-reducing weapon of magnitude, once opened, leads to a flourishing of content development, and the collective memory and shared culture that people once pursued will become harder to achieve.
Previously, only master craftsmen had the golden touch; now everyone holds a wand and recites spells, entering the "material explosion" era of content creation. We may expect more realistic plot crafting and environment shaping. Let generative AI play the role of NPC in a certain sense, with some participants voluntarily investing emotions into various scripts. What should we be concerned about? Will progress happen now or in the next five years?
There is no need to overly worry about this situation, but "what will be important?" is a question! My initial thought is: the mobilization of mental energy and emotions. Perhaps some will say it is attention, thought, logic; part of this is true, as everyone assigns meaning in pursuit of significance, but in the face of a tsunami of content, it may feel powerless to think about what kind of steel structure can support standing tall. Being idealistic and unafraid, still having one's own "style," and maintaining an undisturbed focus to welcome the new stage.
